


Eavesdropping

by Defira



Series: Tarnished Silver [2]
Category: Dragon Age
Genre: F/M, Forbidden, Romance, Secret Relationship, Unrequited Love, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-19
Updated: 2011-10-19
Packaged: 2017-10-24 18:59:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/266773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Defira/pseuds/Defira
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A follow to The Knight Captain's Favour, set about eighteen months later in the early weeks of Act II. Bethany and Cullen realise they've both been keeping secrets from each other, and that sometimes the one thing forbidden to you above all else is the thing that holds the most fascination for you...</p><p>Also, as a side note, my Amell was terrifyingly awful. She was a bitch. Sexual deviant and manipulative psycho don't even begin to cover it. But Cullen was of course younger and impressionable, and Aurelia was quite a handful.</p><p>And brutum fulem was a real latin insult. It meant 'vain or harmless thunderbolt' (bad translation, I know). Basically it referred to someone who was making a lot of noise and being needlessly threatening, but then never followed through on the threats. It seemed rather elemental, referencing a storm, and so it seemed like just the kind of in joke that mages would enjoy. I love it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eavesdropping

Cullen was on library duty.

He hadn’t had to stand guard for several years now, and he had to wonder how on earth he had ever managed to suffer through the hours of tedium and the pain in his feet. But it was necessary- the ranks of his men had been decimated by a particularly virulent cold that had half of them laid up in bed. It had gotten so bad that Meredith had reluctantly given her permission for the healers, under the guidance of Senior Enchanter Cerene, to try and find a tonic or some kind of cure-all that could at least get them back on their feet. She did still suspect that the illness had a malignant origin; some mage plot to weaken the Templars so that the mages could run wild, but the infirmary was one of the most closely watched area of the Gallows even normally, not to mention the guard it had while the enchanters experimented with variations of potions to find a remedy. Given how many mages had fallen ill as well, Cullen didn’t really think they’d be foolish enough to harm their fellows just to have a few days of relative freedom.

He heard the clock chime the hour, and he set off from his post to patrol the aisles and the various nooks and dark corners that could encourage mischief. He tried not to wince at the ache in his feet; it was more important than usual that he appear as the detached, aloof Knight Captain. With their numbers worryingly low, he had to remind the mages that they were hardly free to roam even with so few Templars to watch over them, and he wasn’t above using his rank to cow them back into line.

Turning a corner, he frowned as he came across a table of some of the very youngest apprentices- not a single one of them older than eight- sitting together unsupervised. There were half a dozen books scattered over the table, and the children were glancing from the open pages and then down to the loose sheets in front of them, intense looks of concentration on their little faces as they clumsily held quills in ink stained fingers. The youngest, a little girl of five, had her quill grabbed in her fist as she drew in the book in front of her, rather than on the paper.

“Children,” he said, startling all of them. They all jumped, and the little girl immediately began to tremble, her eyes filling with tears as she sunk down in her seat. He tried not to feel like a monster for scaring a child with a single word. “Why are you here by yourselves? Where is your teacher?”

They all seemed reluctant to speak to him, but eventually one of the boys managed to stammer “Miss Beth is our teacher, ser. She went to put our books back, she only left a minute ago-”

“She didn’t leave us alone!” Another one of the boys was red in the face, and looked like he was trying to decide between scowling and bursting into tears. “She was coming right back, so she ain’t done nothing wrong! Um, ser.”

He tried to ignore the leap in his pulse at the mention of Bethany. “Carry on,” he said. “Your teacher is not in trouble. Although she will be if she allows you to keep drawing in the books.”

Half a dozen pairs of little eyes turned to the girl at the end of the table; someone gasped and one of the other girls pulled the book away from her quickly. “Ella! You’ll get Beth in trouble!”

The little one began to cry, and he could hear one of the others sniffling as if trying to hide tears of their own. He bit his tongue. “I will find your teacher for you,” he said, fighting the urge to stomp away from the table. Duty was never harder than the days when children cried just from seeing him walk towards them.

He headed off into the shelves, frowning when he did not find Bethany immediately. He tried to tell himself that he was searching merely to make sure that the younger members of the Circle remained under a watchful eye, and that he wasn’t eager to see her for his own reasons. In fact, he very nearly succeeded in that, probably due to the fact that he had been telling himself the same message for over eighteen months now. It was like a mantra- _I do not wish to see Bethany Hawke for any other reason than to escort her to so-and-so location. I have no desire to see her for myself_. He had gotten very good at believing it too.

“… and Skoran said he’d be able to get us some of that brandy that he got us last time, and I’ve already got more demonweed than this, so I’d say all up we’ve got enough to have a fairly decent evening.”

He slammed to a halt, his search for Bethany immediately forgotten as the Knight Captain within him took over. Mages with a contraband as dangerous as Felandaris was much more urgent than finding a teacher for a group of unwatched children. He could even smell the tell-tale spark of it in the air, a scent that set the minute amounts of lyrium in his blood on fire even as it offended his physical senses. Glancing through the shelves, he could see another table on the other side of the bookshelf where a handful of young enchanters sat, smoke drifting from the small rolls of paper most of them held.

“We can’t do that now,” one of the young men said, chuckling nastily. “Miss Priss has been eavesdropping, and she’ll run and dob on us now that she knows what we’re up to. Won’t you, Bethany?”

“It can hardly be eavesdropping when you all saw me walk past.” Cullen stiffened at the sound of her voice. She wasn’t visible, but the table was in an awkward corner and there were a number of angles that he had no direct line of sight to. He was reluctant to move, in case the movement drew someone’s attention, so he had to resign himself to simply listening. “And I don’t care what you do in your own time, in the privacy of your own rooms- I only asked you to stop right now because there are children nearby, and you’re hardly setting a good example for them.”

“Oooh, scolded!” The girl who had spoken first laughed; Cullen made a mental note of every mage who sat at the table, but he didn’t interrupt yet. They’d already incriminated one of his men, Ser Skoran, and he was more than a little interested to see how much more he could garner from their inebriated babble. “You should know better than to match wits with the fabulous Bethany Hawke, Sean. She’ll run to her favourite Knight Captain and cry for him to knock you around a bit. Then you’ll be sorry.”

Cullen just stopped himself from lunging through the bookshelves to grab the young woman and shake her. Then he came back to himself and shook his head to clear the haze of violence that had descended over his common sense. He had no claim on Bethany. He didn’t want to make any claim on Bethany. And he definitely didn’t want to lash out stupidly at someone who insulted her, because that would just prove how right the snarky young enchanter was and that would be disastrous for both of them.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Roni.” Bethany sounded tense, not that he could blame her. He had no idea that people had begun to suspect something existed between them- even if he had done his best to grind that something into nothing over the past few years.

“You’re wasting your breath, Roni,” another one of the girls said, taking a pull from the deadly drug in her hand. “Miss Priss wouldn’t know a man wanted to do the nasty with her even if he stripped naked in front of her. She won’t touch Cullen; if it was gonna happen, she’d have done something by now about the way he stares at her when she walks past.”

“Knight Captain Cullen does not stare at me, and I certainly have no desire to touch him.”

The small group of mages cracked up laughing. “Maker, but she’s a terrible liar, isn’t she?” Roni said; clearly the ringleader of the little group. “Ooh, here’s something I’m curious about though- tell me, Miss Priss, have you ever had a day of fun in your whole life? Ever gotten drunk at the very least?”

There was the swish of fabric and Bethany came into his line of sight, looking just as lovely as always. He knew the answer to the question before she even spoke it- of course she’d been drunk. He could remember that night in vivid detail- the dancing, the candlelight, the long awkward walk from Hightown to the docks with a very intoxicated Bethany clutched tightly in his arms, the heart-stopping moment when she’d gone tumbling into the middle of the harbour in the dark… and the moment he’d finally lost all sense of control and had kissed her breathless.

That one single kiss had haunted him every single day, and whenever he caught sight of her around the Gallows, it took all of his self-control not to push her up against a wall and continue what they’d started. The taste of her was maddening, and whenever he smelled honeysuckle he was immensely grateful that Templar armour hid his rather fervent physical reaction.

The only reason he never tried to continue their tryst was the knowledge that it would have dire repercussions for both of them if they were caught- and the fact that Bethany had been too drunk to even remember the events of the night before had only worked in his favour. When she’d hesitantly approached him and asked him if she had behaved inappropriately, he had taken the coward’s path and assured her that nothing had ever taken place between them.

As much as he wished it could be otherwise, it was really the best thing for them both. Now the moment of madness on that dark night lived on only in his memory, forgotten by Bethany and never to be revealed again. If Bethany thought there was some hope for them to be together, she would surely never leave him alone. So it was infinitely better this way.

“Not that it’s any of your business,” Bethany said, “but no- I have never been drunk a single day in my life.”

He felt the floor drop out from beneath him.

“Not at _all?_ ” someone was saying incredulously. “Bloody Maker, you really are a fucking stick in the mud. I can see why you get along so well with the Knight Captain.”

“Surprising, really, isn’t it? I didn’t think nice girls turned his head, not after Aurelia.”

Cullen was still reeling from the revelation that Bethany had never been drunk- _she had to be lying, she must be lying, or else why would she pretend she couldn’t remember their kiss? She had to be lying, she just didn’t want to admit that the one time she’d been drunk had been during an illicit outing with the very man they accused her of having feelings for, and_ oh Maker, _if she hadn’t been drunk that night then that meant she’d let him escape, that she'd known all along for eighteen months_ \- so he didn’t see the way she stiffened.

“Who is Aurelia?”

Sean leant back in his chair, a smirk on his face. “Aurelia Amell. Easiest lay in the whole of Kinloch Hold back in Ferelden… and your cousin, if I am not mistaken.”

“Oh yeah,” Kira said, another ex-Fereldan mage. “I can totally see the resemblance now. I’d never made the connection. Hah, that’s _hilarious_.”

“Well, that’s probably why he likes her then,” Roni was saying. “He probably keeps expecting her to put out like her cousin. Was she any good in bed?”

“Most of Aurelia’s ‘ _experiences_ ’ didn’t really take place in beds, if the rumours were true.”

He’d never felt so ill in his life, and he couldn’t tell what was making it worse- the knowledge that she had deceived him and then _lied_ to him, or seeing the way her whole body went deathly still as her fellows continued to gossip about his stupid infatuation with a woman who was long dead and had never had any claim to his heart in the way that Bethany did. He’d never even _touched_ Aurelia, but that didn’t change how it looked from the outside.

Bethany, her back still to his hiding place, raised her chin before she spoke. He knew that gesture: she was fighting back tears, fighting to appear strong and composed. He’d seen that movement often enough to know what it meant. “If you’ll all excuse me, I have left the children alone for far too long. As delightfully entertaining as your company is, I’m afraid it will take me an hour of scrubbing just to feel clean again from talking to you.”

As she turned and hurried from the little enclave, the mages at the table howled with laughter. “Ooh, zing! _Brutum fulem!_ ” one of them said, at the same time as another one said “Ahh, the burn! It will take me weeks to recover from that one.”

Cullen took a moment to make sure he’d gotten every single mage collected at the table before rushing after Bethany. He came across the children’s table and ignored the way they all flinched at his approach. “Where is your teacher?” he snapped.

“She just left, ser,” the eldest boy said, the one who had stood up to him the first time. “She told us to put our books away and go back to the dormitories.”

“She looked ill, ser,” one of the girls said, her eyes wide with worry. “Has she got the ague?”

He fought the urge to curse. “Maybe,” he said, wanting to sprint after her before this got out of hand. “Clean up your table and do as she said. I will send someone along to make sure you have done as instructed.” He also needed to find someone to break up the drug addled group in the far corner of the library, but even that had become secondary to his desperate need to find her and demand an answer from her. And even that was dwarfed by his frantic need to find her and explain that Aurelia had never meant anything to him in comparison to her.

There were no Templars patrolling immediately outside the library and it took him a few minutes to find enough men to deal with the two tables of mages. Satisfied that the older mages were soon to be locked away in the cells below the Gallows and the younger children would be safely escorted back to the apprentice dormitories, he took the stairs two at a time as he rushed to the Enchanters Wing. His first instinct told him that Bethany would head for her room; if she’d been biting back tears earlier in the library, she was probably going to find a quiet place to gain control over herself.

He knew exactly how many steps it was from the stairs to her door, having counted off in his head every time he had passed it over the last few years. Thirty four steps on a normal day became half that as he all but sprinted down the empty corridor, skidding to a halt in front of the plain wooden door. There was nothing special about it to make it as different from any of the other doors on this floor of the Tower, but at the same time it was infinitely different because it was _hers_. It was the door to temptation, the door to everything he wanted but continued to deny himself, the door to the woman who meant a little more to him each day than she should if he was as dedicated to his duties as he should be.

Not letting himself stop to think or hesitate, he rapped quickly on her door, stopping just short of calling out to her. If she knew it was him, she might ignore him or refuse to let him in. He heard a sniffle, proof that she had been crying, and then the soft swish of her skirts as she came towards the door.

“Who is it?” Her voice was soft, and the emotional tremor that she was unable to disguise was heartbreaking.

“It’s Captain Cullen,” he said. When she didn’t reply, he said “Open the door, Bethany.”

It took a few more seconds for her to answer, and she spoke so quietly that it was nearly a whisper. “Go away, Cullen,” she said; he could picture her now, forehead pressed to the back of the door with her eyes tightly closed against the tears that were still threatening.

He glanced at the row of keys on his belt; he had access to every single room in the fortress, Meredith’s rooms withstanding, so she couldn’t really deny him if he absolutely wanted to get in. It was, however, more important to him that Bethany make the decision to let him enter.

“I’m not going away,” he said, putting his hand to the door where he imagined her hand would be on the other side. “I need to speak to you: you left the apprentices alone in the library without supervision. I’m curious to know why.”

He heard her sigh. “Cullen, if you were in the library to know the children were alone, then you were in the library to hear the rest of what happened. I don’t want to speak to you right now. Please go away.”

He crossed his arms over his chest. “I’m not going anywhere, Bethany, so it’s now up to you- we can have this discussion in private in your room, or I can stand out here in the hallway and continue to talk through the door and draw the attention of everyone who walks past. Is that what you want?”

“What is there to talk about? You used me to relive your fixation with another woman.”

“And how is that any worse than you deceiving me in the first place and then lying to me about that night? You could just ask me about Aurelia rather than jumping to assumptions.”

There was an agonisingly long silence from the other side of the door. “Go away, Cullen,” she said finally, the words little more than a whisper.

“Let me in, Bethany,” he replied instantly. “I’m not going anywhere. You might as well let me in so that nobody hears us fighting.”

“Nobody will hear us fighting if you would just _go away._ ”

He sighed and reached for the keys on his belt, pulling out the key that unlocked every door on this floor. As it slid into the lock and clicked, he heard her strangled gasp. “What are you doing?”

Cullen pushed the door open, meeting a little resistance since she was still clearly on the other side of it. He slipped into the gap as soon as it was wide enough and let it fall closed again; she squeaked in alarm as her efforts to push it closed on him resulted in her stumbling forward the moment he let go of the handle.

His hands came up to steady her and stop her from falling and suddenly- or so it seemed- she was in his arms, trapped between him and the door. She’d very clearly been crying, and the pain still lurked in the depths of her beautiful eyes. “That was a dirty move,” she snapped, her chin trembling as she tried to sound furious with him.

He raised an eyebrow. “As a Hawke, I would have expected you to be used to dirty moves,” he said drily. “Your brother doesn’t exactly play by the rules, after all.”

She was vibrating with the force of the emotions running through her- all of which he could see playing over her face. Anger, heartbreak, humiliation… desire. “Get out of my room before I scream, Cullen. If you’re so damned worried about propriety, then you-”

“I did my best to be worried about propriety on the night that you _pretended_ to get _drunk_ just so that my guard would be down,” he said. “And then the next morning you _lied_ to me and _pretended_ you had no idea what had taken place the night before.”

“And clearly you didn’t want to touch me at all unless I was drunk and shameless and reminded you of some… some… _doxy_ from your past!”

“I never touched Aurelia!” he growled, pushing her closer to the door. “Which is a better promise than you can give to me about never lying.”

“But you clearly wanted to,” she said, a tear slipping onto her cheek. “Otherwise why would they say those horrible things?”

“I can’t deny that I was attracted to your cousin physically,” he said, gritting his teeth at the pain that flickered through her eyes at that confession, “but I was never attracted to her as a person.”

She choked on a sob. “Cullen-”

Maker damn him- this was not how he wanted this confrontation to go. So he did what he’d been wanting to do since that night so long ago and he kissed her again.

Bethany moaned- the sound half frustration and half desire- and immediately slid her hands up around his neck. He pressed her back into the door, teasing her mouth to open while his hands came to rest on the curve of her hips. Sweet blood of the prophet, she tasted just like he remembered, and it took everything he had not to simply devour her. The spark of lyrium danced along his tongue as he tasted her, lapping gently at her mouth, and the scent of honeysuckle in the air nearly overwhelmed his senses.

She was bolder than he expected, responding to his touch with frantic little mewling noises that set his blood on fire. She tangled her tongue with his, her fingers clutching at him fiercely as she kept him locked tightly against her. When he tore away for a brief moment, gasping for breath, she panted “ _Cullen_ \- we _can’t_ do this.”

He was glad one of them had a semblance of sanity. “I know,” he said, before kissing her again. When she moaned against his mouth, he took advantage of her lapse to chase her tongue with his again, greedily drinking in every sigh and whimper that escaped from her. “Have to stop.”

“We do,” she gasped. “Can’t… can’t get caught. _Cullen_.”

The way she moaned his name made his head light with desperate need. All he wanted to do in that moment was pick her up and carry her to the bed several feet away. “Bethany,” he groaned, feeling her shiver in his arms. “We have to stop this.”

She managed to disengage, panting desperately as she rested her head against his breastplate. Unable to help himself, he kissed the top of her head and she groaned. “We can’t let this happen,” she whispered; her whole body was quivering with need.

“Yes,” he murmured, letting his hands trace along the curve of her hips. He wished abruptly that he wasn’t wearing gloves just then. “If they catch us-”

“Don’t say it,” she said quickly, covering his lips with her fingers. When he kissed them, she shuddered, her face still hidden against his chest. “We just… can’t spend time together. It’ll be easier if we never have to spend time together.”

 _I would risk it for you._ He didn’t say it out loud though. “That is sound thinking,” he said, even though it shredded him from the inside out to say it. “And for what it’s worth… I’m sorry you heard about Aurelia this way. She never meant anything to me, and I never touched her.”

She took a long time to reply. “I’m sorry I lied to you,” she said softly. “It was Isabela’s idea, the whole drunk thing, and I was just so desperate that I-”

He turned her face up and kissed her again, cutting off her apology before she could start to babble. They lost themselves for quite some time, and they were both gasping for air when they finally broke away.

“Bethany,” he whispered, unable to stop himself from nuzzling at her ear, “I think I-”

“No, Cullen,” she said, her fingers pressed firmly against his lips again. She twisted in his arms until they were nose to nose, her gaze burning into his. “If you say that… we can’t go back from that. I can’t… I’m not strong enough to stay away if we say that.”

He took his time to find the right answer. “Then we shall just be friends,” he said, trying to pretend the words didn’t burn him as he said them.

She nodded quickly. “Friends,” she said, undermining the determination in her tone by leaning forward and kissing him again. “Just friends. We can do that. We can absolutely do that.”

He groaned as her lips brushed against his. “Bethany, I don’t think I can do that.”

She let out a sound that could have been half sob. “I can’t either,” she whispered, “but we have to try.”

***

Later that evening, as he undressed for bed, a moment of whimsy overcame him. He padded barefoot over to his desk and hunted around in the bottom draw for the box that held his trinkets. Pressing the secret hinge, he tipped it open and let the few small items fall onto the desktop. Picking up the necklace from Aurelia, he walked across to the fireplace and tossed it into the flames, watching as the cheap metal blackened and began to warp in the heat. When it was finally unrecognisable, he went back for the only other thing in the box- Bethany’s handkerchief.

Treating it with infinitely more care than he had ever treated the necklace, he tied the scrap of lacy fabric around his wrist, tucking it under the sleeve of his shirt and out of sight. The tiniest hint of honeysuckle drifted through the air and he inhaled deeply.

Maker grant him strength- because he’d just about used up all of his own.


End file.
